S2E1 - From Stress To Flexibility - How Sarah Stemen Did It

Jim Banks [00:00:00]:
Welcome to this episode of Bad Decisions with Jim Banks. We've had a summer break to get rid of all the emotions from schools and stuff like that. But now that we're getting to darker nights at home to bring the podcast back, and I'm delighted to have Sarah. And I'm going to butcher your last name. Is it Stemen or Stayman?

Sarah Stemen [00:00:21]:
Yeah, no Steman.

Jim Banks [00:00:23]:
There we go. I was, look, when people have names that are Smith or Jones, I'm like, great, I can do this. So Sarah, Steven, who is a business owner who has set up her own business coming up to a year ago, and we're going to talk a little bit about that today. But Sarah, it's great to have you as a guest on the show.

Sarah Stemen [00:00:40]:
Thank you. Glad to be here.

Jim Banks [00:00:42]:
So tell us a little bit about your sort of, I always say let's talk a little bit about your hero story. How did you get into the industry in the first place? You've been doing it quite a while, I believe, and maybe just tell us a little bit about how you got into the industry and where you put progressed to where you are now.

Sarah Stemen [00:00:56]:
Yeah, no, that's a great question. I rarely talk about how I got into the industry, but don't forget the industry wasn't really invented when I started in the current form. So actually I was in it. So I was in technology to begin with and I wanted to go into marketing. I was working on my master's degree and I had a recruiter that was recruiting for a marketing analytics position and I took that job. I was working on analytics. So like reporting on nationwide.com dot, I worked in a big corporation at the heyday of marketing. I was working on actually like taking the customer satisfaction survey that they posted on their website and taking the data and interpreting it for the usability teams and the content team.

Sarah Stemen [00:01:43]:
And again, keep in mind this is a huge organization. Digital marketing is brand new. It was influxd and what happened was the analytics team was moving under another manager and my manager was like, I like you, I want to keep you so guess what you do. I was SEO in PPC and there I landed and have not looked back.

Jim Banks [00:02:04]:
I always say you can date people as to whether they were pre or post IPO Google. So it sounds like you were probably a little bit pre, just a little bit pre in terms of your entry into the market.

Sarah Stemen [00:02:15]:
Yeah, so 2007 I'm trying to think.

Jim Banks [00:02:17]:
No, I think Google IP had ipo'd at that point. So your post post YouTube because I think again, YouTube I think was 2005.

Sarah Stemen [00:02:24]:
Or something like that, or around YouTube. So YouTube cat videos and YouTube, like, I don't know if you remember the brand channels. So, like, there was a big amount of money you could pay for a brand channel. We did that. But I was YouTube, where two young people like myself and an intern could set up Nationwide's YouTube channel in a cafe downtown with no one even caring.

Jim Banks [00:02:50]:
And it's funny, you look at it now and it's like a multi billion dollar industry, but it still has those almost like single points of failure. You hear of all these stories of people forgetting to renew domains because the person who set it up has left the company and they hand their email account and their domain just lapses because nobody's actually paying any attention to it.

Sarah Stemen [00:03:13]:
Yes, I came from that generation of marketers, okay.

Jim Banks [00:03:17]:
I always say, when I talk about PPC and Google Ads and everything, they always say to me to what's it been like? And I'm like, well, the one thing you can guarantee is that there's always going to be change. Change is the only inevitable that we have to be changed. It's going to be rapid, always been rapid. And usually the deck is loaded against us. So again, I run an agency. You're obviously running a training consulting business now. So we'll talk about that. But what would you say has been the sort of change? How has that kind of impacted your love of the industry?

Sarah Stemen [00:03:51]:
So I would say there's, and I don't know if it's a chicken or egg thing, but I would say, like, the industry has become a lot more transactional than it used to be. So when I, and again, I don't know if it's agencies training clients or clients training agencies, but there is a go get this result. That is the result that I want. I'm going to point at it and you're just going to do it. And that comes from the client to the agency. And the agency has this wait, timeout. We need to look at the entire business model. We need to look at the landing page, we need to look at the conversions, we need to look at these like 50 other factors that go into that.

Sarah Stemen [00:04:32]:
But I also blame the industry too, because there's a performance marketing. Get this, roas. It almost feels like when you're trying to market yourself as a paid search professional, you're trying to sell them on Google Ads. And so it's a chicken and egg thing that it's a bit of a shame because I believe that when you work tightly with the client and you look at all these factors, you can actually deliver astronomically better performance.

Jim Banks [00:04:59]:
Yeah, it's funny you touched on that. I always remember back in the very, very early days when I first started, I started my first agency in 2000 and I always remember like the sort of finding new clients, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. There were so many people that wanted help. And I think the beauty of digital marketing back then is it was such a trackable point of entry to point of exit solution. You pinpoint exactly how much money you spend, how much money you get. And historically marketing has never worked that way. You've always like, I've spent a million dollars, I've made some money, but I don't really know how much of it has come from that marketing campaign versus other stuff that's gone on. Whereas we were able to say if you spent 50,000 and you made 500,000, you could say you made ten x your spend.

Jim Banks [00:05:44]:
And I almost feel like the way we've gone, and certainly in the last few years, we've almost like gone back to the, we don't really know what's happening. There's so much more that's in the ether with influencer marketing. It's like somebody puts stuff out there, there's no trackable outcome. So you have to throw in a lot more fuzzy logic to the kind of the way in which you interpret the results. You can say yes, they have happened, but I think that's where having a good marketing mix and understanding all of the component channels that make up that marketing mix, which for me in some respects that's one of the things that I'm struggling with. Some of the AI solutions that meta have got, that Google have got, Microsoft got, because they're all working on their own platforms, they're not platform agnostic like most agencies or consultants are, or in house. In house obviously manages all the channels, whereas Google just does Google, Microsoft just does Microsoft meta just does meta. So again, I'd love to know what your thoughts were as to whether that's something that, because they say, oh, it's great, it's fantastic, our results are going to be phenomenal, but they're not really understanding the full requirements of the business.

Jim Banks [00:06:53]:
To be able to say that with some degree of confidence. I think there's probably an element of.

Sarah Stemen [00:06:57]:
Bullshit in there, really all of the above. And I think that's the hard part. I almost would argue, and I hate saying this as an independent freelancer, that in some ways clients can be better served by an agency at this point because it really has to be everywhere. You have to be fluid among meta, Google, frankly, organic, social, which I think is highly underutilized still. And it's not necessarily underutilized. I also think it's underutilized and undervalued. I have a lot of theories there. I think one of the theories is that it is a typical women dominated industry, and industries that are women owned and or dominated tend to be seen.

Jim Banks [00:07:42]:
As lesser than I always remember. I was doing some consulting for a company back in the day that sold magnetic eyelashes, and during the pandemic, I think they sold like four or $5 million worth of magnetic eyelashes in one month. And I'm like, what the hell is.

Sarah Stemen [00:07:57]:
I actually want those.

Jim Banks [00:07:59]:
But obviously, people were sitting at home and watching social media posts that people kind of going, this is how you attach them. And they're like, wow, that's amazing. So, again, lots of user generated content, but again, I think when you look at it, so much of the user, generic, to me, user generated content is. It should be, you know, user as in the end user, the proper customer. But so much of it is like influencers that don't have a clue what the product is. They just get sent it, they get told to film it, and they go, here's this person using the product, but you've got these 22 year old beautiful women putting on the skin cream to put anything on their skin at all.

Sarah Stemen [00:08:38]:
Yeah, this looks beautiful.

Jim Banks [00:08:39]:
Pointless.

Sarah Stemen [00:08:41]:
Yeah. And, I mean, I think that that goes into, like, what we used to always talk about in the good old days of marketing, the halo effect. So you see something on TikTok, if you're not buying it through TikTok shops, or if you're seeing it on wherever, you think about it later, and then Google. And are they gonna have a presence on Google? Did they do SEO in any way, shape, or form? Do they have paid ads that are right there to capture you with the beautiful landing page? Like, too much of that has been lost, especially in small and mid sized businesses that need it the most.

Jim Banks [00:09:13]:
Yeah. So one of my guests on last season's kind of podcast episodes was Boris, who I absolutely love. Boris is a great guy, right? He does consulting for clients rather than doesn't call himself an agency. He just works freelance solo. But what was really interesting is that the kind of the way he has leveraged social media, so LinkedIn and places like that to help put himself out there. And I know that you're, I guess I would call you quite prolific in that regard, putting content out across the board. So you've got YouTube, you've got Instagram, you've got, you've got. Where else are you?

Sarah Stemen [00:09:53]:
Yeah, YouTube. YouTube shorts. I am on Instagram. That makes me a little bit tired, TikTok. I mean, pretty much everywhere I, and I go against the green, I believe you have to be omnichannel at this point. And I don't even try moving people to a primary, but my primary is LinkedIn for sure.

Jim Banks [00:10:12]:
I know that your most recent post on your YouTube channel, which will be in the show, notes, I put all of the links to all your stuff in there so people can go and follow you. Because, again, I love the fact that you're very opinionated. You talk from love, but one of the most recent videos that you posted was talking about the, the size of your channels and obviously the money that you make. And I think sometimes people just assume that there's a correlation between the two, but quite often the kind of correlation is not as direct as that's the money I make from that size audience, because obviously some of that audience will be people that are looking for consulting help. So clearly the return for you is going to be driven by the value of the client that you can bring on board. So how do you actually find most of the clients that you work with now?

Sarah Stemen [00:10:56]:
So I would say 99% come through LinkedIn for sure, with occasional tire kickers through the other platforms. And then how I look at the other platforms is almost a practice type of place. So, like, certain things that work phenomenally well on LinkedIn I got from TikTok. So, like, on TikTok, it's just, and I'll go with each channel here. TikTok is very superficial, so it's like hot girl summer, hot girl logs. It's a fun place. So I took that over to link it in and said, well, here's my hot girl PPC summers. That post did really, really well.

Sarah Stemen [00:11:39]:
And just, I will only take consulting clients, so I tie it back into my offer, but I sort of practice also. Other things are, the hooks are very, very important on TikTok YouTube shorts. And so just making sure that you get those locked in helps you become that much better on your primary platform. So sometimes I'm not always using it as like an actual formal get clients method. And then another thing, and I hate saying this out loud because I wish that people didn't know or I don't like to share it, but if people don't make on TikTok their profile private, I can actually see who's looking at it so I can see my clients or like a lead looking at my TikTok and looking at my profile. So I'm like, I know that I'm talking to them because they're visiting my profile and then they'll reach out on LinkedIn or some place like that. Email. Later on.

Jim Banks [00:12:34]:
When I talk to people about running my agency, we have way more inquiries, people who want to work with us than we want to work with them for sure. That's typically very unusual sort of scenario most agencies are scratching around here in the UK. I know lots of agency owners that are really struggling. Some have shut downs. It's really impacting their mental health and everything. And for me, again, I don't know what you do and I'd be interested to know, but what I've done is I've deliberately gone and been very specific about the types of companies that I want to work with and the companies by default there that I don't want to work with. So again, I always say, all my profiles say I like to work with businesses that ecommerce, businesses that run on Shopify that are doing between one and $5 million a year in revenue, looking to grow to between five and 50 because I know by default they're going to be a fairly well established business. So that means I don't work with startups because I found quite often startups can be quite arrogant and they don't vibe with me.

Jim Banks [00:13:35]:
I don't work with massive e commerce businesses that do 100 million, 200 million, 500 million. We're just a small p in a stew, right? And I'd much rather be a more significant contributor to the overall success of that business and help have my fingers in lots of different pies rather than, well, you just do the Google and this guy does the Microsoft and this guy does this and this guy's, you can have more value that you can can bring to the table, but that doesn't mean that we don't work with businesses that are not Shopify doing one to 5 million, right. But I think a lot of it, then it becomes a do I like them as a person rather than do I like them as a business? Because for me, again, it sounds blase, but I'm not doing it for the money. I do it for the value I can bring to the table. And I've always said I'll put far more money on the table than I will ever take off the table. And the people that start querying how much money I make are not looking at it in the right way. They should be looking at what they make, not what I make, because what I make is a byproduct of what they make. Right.

Sarah Stemen [00:14:42]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:14:42]:
I'm not saying it's a percentage, but it's like, it's a, there's a definite correlation between I make money because they've made money.

Sarah Stemen [00:14:49]:
That makes sense.

Jim Banks [00:14:50]:
How do you do that in terms of the kind of the same selection process for your clients that you work with?

Sarah Stemen [00:14:57]:
Well, since I'm new, a lot of like, throwing flies against the wall. But I will definitely say I take an approach and it's a bit of a mindset where it's like, what I put out there is what I'll attract. And I tend to believe that. So I believe because I'm so, so content driven, I attract a certain type of person that wants to learn, that cares about, especially the content side of their business. Because for me, when I talk to clients, I'm actually training them to get them to not rely on Google Ads as much. I want them to build up that content side so that they can eventually flux down a little bit on the ads front. So I think that's one aspect is because I push so much content, I tend to get that type. But then also on LinkedIn, I have a really, really good discovery form.

Sarah Stemen [00:15:51]:
And so my discovery form, the first question I ask, and I make them required, is I say, what is your fee for management? Even though I'm not doing management anymore, I haven't changed this form because it still works. And I say 3500 a month, 5000 a month, 7000 a month. And so they forced them to make that selection. And so then when they come to me, I'm like, okay, well, I'm already not gonna be quoting you less than what you've said you can afford right off the bat. But then I have that conversation with them and realize, can I look at them as a training client or a management client? And like we said, I don't do management anymore, but I always keep management in the back of my mind if it's like this perfect, perfect fit.

Jim Banks [00:16:35]:
So it's not like you don't do it. It's just like you're very selective about.

Sarah Stemen [00:16:39]:
Very selective. So, like, where I've been able to make the biggest impact, which is shocking because I don't consider myself a lead gym specialist. I'm actually a ecommerce specialist. But I make the biggest impact with small budget b, two b clients. And that's because a lot of times they value the most from like an organized strategy and structure. And a lot of times they don't have it because when you're spending 3500 a month, you can't necessarily afford a high quality agency. You've gone either someplace that's holding you hostage and you have to build from scratch or you've been the victim of, unfortunately, the steak oil in our industry. And so I tend to do really well with those types of clients and it's a hybrid.

Sarah Stemen [00:17:21]:
So I'll build out the account for them and then I will put on a loom, I will videotape myself building their account for them and I'll talk them through every single piece of it. Like, this is why I chose this keyword, this is why I chose these ad groups. And then the goal is for me to like fire myself to get them to manage it. Yeah, always.

Jim Banks [00:17:40]:
Yeah. Because I think a lot of the time, again, if you're good at what you do, I always said, like the kind of the best PPC experts, broadly speaking, once they get to get things dialed in, don't have to do that much. Right.

Sarah Stemen [00:17:54]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:17:56]:
You know, and you know, you might say, well, at that point in time, they don't need us. Right. They definitely do because like I said earlier, right, change is the one thing we're guaranteed to have. Right. So again, if you look in the last twelve months we had performance maps, we've had demand general. There's been all sorts of things that have come in, lots of things that have gone out. And unless you understand what's changed in the landscape, the strategies that may have worked today, might work today, might not work in twelve months time. And the stuff that worked twelve months ago won't work now.

Jim Banks [00:18:23]:
If you don't know what buttons to press or what things to change, you could end up being in desperate need for help constantly. Again, I always think in some respects it's better for them to just have you on a sort of retainer right where you're there, you can offer support, advice, the over the shoulder. And again, I have a lot of the clients that I work with where they are doing a lot of the work, and we're just like there to go. What about this? This, I'm playing devil's advocate with them. Why did you do that? Why did you do that? And then that way they're able to be more self sufficient. They don't need to worry about. If I got run over by a bus yesterday, I would agree.

Sarah Stemen [00:18:59]:
And I think, you know, that was so I have another thing. And again, these are just things that I developed so like, if a client doesn't go with me, I don't follow up. So I don't chase clients. If they don't respond back after a discovery call, I'm not going to follow up with them. I just. Because I never want to start out that relationship where I'm looking to sell them on something, I want them to come to me because they felt that connection. Does that mean potentially I lose business to someone who chases and they're looking at three other people? Potentially, but it's not something that I still want to do. And then, to your point, on that retainer, and I think this is something I battled with.

Sarah Stemen [00:19:38]:
So I have one of my very first clients who I set the entire campaign up for them. It's working beautifully. I'm still in their ads, but they haven't paid me. I'm not part of their retainer, but I still see them in the MCC, which is common. Campaign's going well. But I know that, like, if that goes off the rails, just through, like, google changing to your point, or there's been no negative hygiene put on the account, so it could start slowly going in the wrong direction, they're kind of up a creek. It's became bad decisions. Right.

Sarah Stemen [00:20:11]:
And it's like, do I proactively reach out to them and be like, hey, you should have paid my $3,500 retainer. And I know your campaigns are working now, but you're just paying that in case they aren't, you know, I don't know. So. But I also kind of looked at it where I'm like, you're a big person, you're a CMO, you can make that decision for your own good.

Jim Banks [00:20:32]:
Again, this might sound, I'm giving you this advice, but really, it's anyone that's listening in that runs an agency, if you stop working with a client, right, but you still have access to their account through the MCC, the best thing you can do for yourself is to take yourself out of that account, because it is horrible to sit there. And as you say, whether it's another agency they brought in to replace you or whatever, like, to sit and watch the carnage of things falling apart, and as you say, like, you see things happening, you're going, well, not paying me any money. Why should I volunteer to problem for them? So, again, I used to do the same thing. I had, like, access to a whole bunch of accounts, right? They don't take you out of the MCC or they don't take you out. Analytics. I mean, again, sometimes it's hard for you to do that. It's hard to extricate yourself from the sort of.

Sarah Stemen [00:21:22]:
Yeah, you care.

Jim Banks [00:21:23]:
Right. So now it's like as soon as you lost clients, I lost one fairly recently because they were work, we were working with one part of their business. They had another business that they had acquired or they had acquired them who were working with their own partner. So it's not going to work with two agencies. They said, we're going to go with that guy. And I'm like, cool, that's fine. Literally the minute we came off the last call, I just went, you know, remove myself. Remove myself? Removed myself.

Jim Banks [00:21:51]:
I just didn't want to see.

Sarah Stemen [00:21:53]:
It's like stocking an x. Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:21:55]:
Because every single month we'd hit the numbers that they wanted without fail for three years, religiously, without fail, hit the number every month. It was always changing. Changeable number up and down, really stretching target, CPA and everything else.

Sarah Stemen [00:22:09]:
But we hit it.

Jim Banks [00:22:10]:
Whatever they asked us for, we hit it. And they were, the people I was working with were really upset to lose the relationship that we built up over those three years. But they understood the new CEO had his own vision about what they were going to do, and that was fine. So now I just like, as soon as it's gone, I remove myself. I don't want to be. I just don't want to see it.

Sarah Stemen [00:22:32]:
Right? Yeah, yeah.

Jim Banks [00:22:34]:
So I mentioned that you're running your own business. You set it up about eleven months ago, something like that. How have you found that? Because it's obviously a fairly big step, big change to go from working for other people to working for yourself. How did you make that decision and how have you found it?

Sarah Stemen [00:22:52]:
Yeah, so I made the decision. To put it nicely, I was unhappy at the agency that I was working at. I loved, loved the clients, but the expectation was that the work be done on the weekends. It was nonstop meetings. It was a lot. And I have three kids, so I think when it got emotionally painful enough, I just had to go. And my daughter is a competitive dancer, which if anyone knows anything about competitive dance, it's beyond expensive. It's what we thought gymnastics would be.

Sarah Stemen [00:23:27]:
Dance is like quadruple that. I think the bill keeps going up and up, but we're now up to like 1500 a month. And that doesn't include her costumes, which she's gonna do, a custom costume, and it could just go on and on. In any case, my kid's also talented, which I've never had a talented kid, so you never wanna say no. So now I'm in a position where I have to have some type of income. So it was, leave my job and do something.

Jim Banks [00:23:56]:
But you also have the flexibility to be able to kind of. Again, with Boris, he runs his own business. He can take the summer off and spend it with his wife and his daughter. He's got nobody to answer to for that.

Sarah Stemen [00:24:07]:
Exactly, exactly.

Jim Banks [00:24:08]:
You know, and I'm guessing you're in the same boat, right?

Sarah Stemen [00:24:11]:
Same, same, yeah. My husband was like, just make 3000 a month. I'm like, okay, that's not hard. So that's where we're at. And I made, you know, way, way more than that. But he set a goal that I found was achievable. But it's exactly what you said. Like, I bought a pool membership this summer.

Sarah Stemen [00:24:30]:
I spent, like, I mean, I probably worked on average, 8 hours a week. Like, I just really took the summer to just work, kind of work on the business. And then the clients that I had were on that consulting route. So I would have these, I'm gonna call them, like, short retainers. So training consulting. So they'd be three to four month engagements where I build and coach the team. So I knew my income and I could do that. And then I build into the contract what works for both of us.

Sarah Stemen [00:25:02]:
So the contracts, a lot of times were no before work, no after work. But I'll teach you absolutely everything I know.

Jim Banks [00:25:09]:
Yeah. And I always say that a good agency or a good consultant, they need to train their customers to work the way they want them to work. I went to Brighton SEO at the end of last year, and there's, do you know Crystal Carter, who works for Wix? Amazing, amazing lady. But she was, like, doing some stuff for TikTok, and she interviewed me, and she was, because I was tending a roundtable for agency owners. And I said, whenever I have a new client that I land, I always say to them, look, the conversation I have is, look, I'm really good at running paid search campaigns. I'm really crap at chasing people for money. If I ever have to make a call chasing you for money, we are done. And I do that before we even started working with them.

Jim Banks [00:25:56]:
And every single client I've ever had since I had that conversation, it's never ever been an issue, because they know we've had the conversation. If they're going to have a problem, they'll pick up the phone and talk to me about it. So it's not going to hit me as a, wow, this is unexpected. I was expecting money and didn't get it if you set the expectations. If you say, I'm married, I've got three kids, the kids are my life. I have the summers off. But again, when we're working, I'm 100% with you and we're going to get stuff done, but just expect a lot less from me in the summer. One of the reasons why I chose working with e commerce businesses that run on Shopify is, generally speaking, most e commerce businesses have a bit of a lull in the summer.

Jim Banks [00:26:36]:
It dives completely with what I'm looking for. I'm looking for businesses that maybe are much busier in the fourth quarter of the year. In the first quarter of the year, but maybe quieter in the second and third quarters.

Sarah Stemen [00:26:47]:
Yeah, no, that makes sense.

Jim Banks [00:26:50]:
So you posted on LinkedIn about a week ago, you had a poll that was running and you were talking about, is PPC dying? So you had a poll, I think there's about 380 people on LinkedIn gave you a response, and I think the response was like 78% said no and 28% said yes. But you said you had some opinions and you were going to share them. So I read through the comments. I couldn't really see like a full, this is kind of like you got, you wanted to get stuff off your chest. Maybe this is a good venue for you to get stuff off your chest in terms of what you thought.

Sarah Stemen [00:27:27]:
Yeah. So I, I will say I think it's dying. I do. And I think someone in the comments made a joke like, oh yeah, the Internet's dying and blah, blah, blah. Okay, I get it. I think big companies are still going to spend a ton of money in Google Ads. I do think for the average business owner, it's unfortunately a dying death of a thousand cuts. I believe that we're back to the holistic marketing.

Sarah Stemen [00:28:00]:
I think I had mentioned organic social getting. The younger generation is just less attracted to the ads. So it is, as a business owner picking up your face and being like, this is my business. It's human to human, authentic content. I think that's where it's at right now. And so, yes, I think it's dying. If I had to summarize what I think, I think it was in that comment, somebody said the management of it is dying. And it simply is because these small businesses, they can't afford to pay for ads and then pay someone like an agency a huge retainer.

Jim Banks [00:28:40]:
Yeah. But again, if you look at it, I always used to say to people, it is incredibly easy to set up a Google Ads account and to scratch money, right? And if you're, if you're a small local business, they made it super, super easy with Adwords Express.

Sarah Stemen [00:28:57]:
Yes, yes, we're campaigns now.

Jim Banks [00:28:59]:
You just come in, give us your credit card and we'll do everything. And, you know, again, like it's, it's only when you switch to the advanced mode, you see all the things that they've stripped away to make that environment for. You realize just how bad kind of adwords express, smart campaigns, whatever, really is. But, but I think the challenge is, I mean, Google's objective has always been they want to make as much money for themselves, right? Which means that advertisers have to make a certain amount of money in order for them to keep the lights on and keep the businesses going and everything else, so. But they need to give you just enough. They're never going to go, I could deliver you, I could deliver you clicks at like ten cents a throw, but I'm going to charge you $14 a click because that's what the auctions kind of like, they're going to charge what they can afford to get away with. That's the way they've always done it. And they say, oh, it's all smart auctions, AI, and just leave it to us and we'll do everything.

Jim Banks [00:29:56]:
But again, the kind of skeptics, and I consider myself to be probably one of the biggest skeptics going, will always be. Actually, you know what, I don't think that's actually true. And I think sometimes, again, I think when you look at the, the kind of, the legal stuff that's going on in the background now and when you read through some of that, I spend time, loads of time reading through ten queues and quarterly returns to see what's going on because they have to be very truthful in those, otherwise they go to jail. Like all the transcripts from these hearings that took place and I think they're fluffing the cushions or checking the back of the cushions, I've always been cynical of the way in which they've run the business, but at the same time it's like I've made a very good living off the back, working in collaboration with Google. I've always said I've got a hate, hate relationship with them, but it's, again, it's been very beneficial for all of us. The clients I've worked with, them and me, we've all done really well on the back of it. Just think at the moment, the amount of restrictions that they're trying to apply with AI has made the creativity that I think a lot of people that were really good at it, we used to be able to get YouTube, GDA and all that sort of stuff dialed in really well. It took a bit of, bit of effort, but we eventually got to the point where we knew exactly what to do, we knew what to exclude, we knew what to add and all that sort of stuff.

Jim Banks [00:31:13]:
Whereas now it's almost because they come up with Pmax, all of a sudden it's like that just does everything. And again, I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to capitalize. They see the money that Facebook or meta are making on the back of some of their, I mean, search has always been, you type in a search term because people are looking specifically for something that is of interest now rather than it being contextual and it's a bit more etheric. So I think with, with some of the stuff that goes on in Facebook, people are not going to Facebook looking for one thing in particular. They might be interrupted by something and they might see an ad. Actually, yeah, I'm looking for magnetic art. Great. But.

Jim Banks [00:31:55]:
But it's not something that they were actively thinking of and searching out, going seeking it. Right. So, yeah, I just, you know, I just think it's sort of. There will always be a place for consultants, for good agencies. I think the challenge is the barrier for entry for agencies is super low. You could probably set up an agency for like $100 domain name, email account, website on WordPress. Bang. I'm an agency, there's nothing to say you've got any experience of doing it.

Jim Banks [00:32:27]:
And to your point about the kind of managing an omnichannel, multi channel market strategy, that's typically not something that most agencies that are brand spanking new can actually do anything near what they need to. And that's always one of the challenges. Sometimes you pick up a client that's had five or six really bad experiences with agencies because they made bad decisions hiring agencies, because they got sucked in by the promises that were made to them that were completely unrealistic. I always say to clients, if they go, well, I'm going to give you $1,000 and I need you to get me like 500 leads a day, every day for a month for a. Some agencies will go, yeah, sure, I can do that. And then they don't.

Sarah Stemen [00:33:11]:
Yeah, right.

Jim Banks [00:33:12]:
Whereas I'm going to push back and I'm going to go, you know what? It's not even going to be close to anywhere near that. You're not going, you need to be much more proactive. Again, if their site sucks, I'll say your site sucks, your landing pages suck. Because I'm not, as much as I'm saying good at PPC, I'm not a magician. I can't make a really crappy landing page into a silk purse. It just doesn't work. So you really have to be brutal with your feedback when it comes to doing those sorts of things.

Sarah Stemen [00:33:40]:
The interesting part is, more and more, I'm actually getting clients from large agencies paying large retainers that are all also in a bad predicament. So I thought it was only the cheap agencies, but these larger agencies. And what it is is they'll have somebody that's fairly junior, that is one account, or if it's not someone junior, it's somebody that has 40 accounts on their plate. So it's like there's this, the lack of what the client needs, which is like, the conversational part being like, hey, this is what I'm seeing in your account. What does this mean to you? I mean, there have been times, especially in b two b, where I'll see search terms and they're like, actually, yes, that's very helpful. Let's make a campaign about that. There's a lot of data and insights. And keep in mind, old school us, we used to say PPC is about performance, but PPC is about learning.

Sarah Stemen [00:34:34]:
And that has been a lost craft. And when you're loading people up, it, and it's almost like you're treating paid search management as a light switch, and it's not. It's an insight and an open door into your business.

Jim Banks [00:34:49]:
Yeah.

Sarah Stemen [00:34:49]:
And so I feel like that is why the consulting route works so much better for me than. Because I can say, this is what I see. And I'm not tied to the fact that you were spending 30,000, now you need to spend ten. Now, let's look at this.

Jim Banks [00:35:05]:
Yeah. I've always said that people hire an agency or a consultant for one of two things. They either hire them for expertise or they hire them for utility. Right. And if they're utility, then, yeah, by all means, go to your Philippines, your kind of Indias, your Pakistans or whatever. Again, I've got nothing against. I've got some really amazing people that work in all those countries who are fantastic at doing what they do. But it's, again, it's not just about what you do with the accounts.

Jim Banks [00:35:34]:
You also need to manage the relationship and everything else. Again, it's very, very difficult to kind of have all of those components handled by one individual or whatever you might be. But it is one of those things. I think a lot of people hire you for expertise, but then don't lean on your expertise. They just want you to kind of do this, do this, do this, do this.

Sarah Stemen [00:35:55]:
Yes, yes.

Jim Banks [00:35:56]:
That's not what you hired me for. Right. Again. And I've actually resigned accounts. I've said, look, you want me to do all this stuff, but really, in all honesty, I'm way too expensive for you to pay me to do that when you could hire some monkey to do that. Like, easy.

Sarah Stemen [00:36:09]:
Yes.

Jim Banks [00:36:10]:
It'll be much cheaper than me, right? Yeah, because you're not relying on my expertise. You're just going to go, you're going to tell me what to do. And they'll go, well, the previous agency did that. I'm like, yeah, but you fired the previous agency because they didn't get results. Right.

Sarah Stemen [00:36:25]:
I've had that, too. I've had business owners that enjoy just telling me what to do when it's not working. And I'm like, it's not working. And then you're just to the point where you're like, I don't even want my name anywhere near this account I've had. And it's always sad when you get a business owner but used to run ads, I think Julie gave me the term. I would do it myself if I had time client. And they're just like, it worked in 2011 like this. Yeah, I had a client that had duplicated the entire ads account from something that had worked, you know, ten years prior, and I'm like, just unwilling to.

Sarah Stemen [00:37:02]:
Maybe there's like some cognitive dissonance going on there and, yeah, you try. You try your best.

Jim Banks [00:37:07]:
Yeah, you really.

Sarah Stemen [00:37:09]:
Sometimes you can't.

Jim Banks [00:37:10]:
Just because something worked then doesn't mean it'll work even remotely close to now. Right, so. Because the world is different.

Sarah Stemen [00:37:17]:
Exactly, exactly.

Jim Banks [00:37:20]:
So I see that you're speaking at hero Conf. In.

Sarah Stemen [00:37:24]:
Yes, yes.

Jim Banks [00:37:26]:
In November.

Sarah Stemen [00:37:27]:
Yes. In same day ago.

Jim Banks [00:37:31]:
So, I mean, have you done a lot of speaking over the years or.

Sarah Stemen [00:37:34]:
Yeah, so, I mean, I guess I'm always speaking to clients. So when I was at a big agency, I was always speaking to clients. It was more time in decks, almost probably 50 50 with the ads platform. But, like, speaking at conferences, I spoke at Brighton, and then just a lot of online speaking, too. I never say no to podcasts. I think making my own TikToks. Like, I just am always putting myself out there. And it's actually one of the ways that I've gotten clients.

Sarah Stemen [00:38:02]:
I also lead the paid search association, webinars. I'm the host. And I try to tell people, like, they're great ways to get clients, because clients will take the time to listen to podcasts more than they will listen to, like a TikTok. It's a, you're spending 30 minutes, 40 minutes with a person versus, you know, 20 seconds. There's a more of an investment there. So I'll do that. Yeah. And then I write, too, for search engine land.

Jim Banks [00:38:31]:
So when you actually speak at a conference, do you have a specific? Because, again, I know that the whole subject of speaking at conferences, right, and whether you should be paid or you shouldn't be paid, and whether they should cover your travel costs or not and everything else, like most of the kind of the speaking I do now, right. It's because the person who runs the conference is a good friend of mine, and I'm trying to help them out. So for me, again, it's like, historically, I used to get, again, like shooting fish in a barrel and stand up on stage, presented a conference like Pubcon. I mean, I'm doing Pubcon with Fred Valets and Steve happy doing a workshop. I'm also doing like an advanced PPC session. It used to be historically, you'd stand up at a conference like that. It'd be tons and tons of people in the crowd that were decision makers, budget holders. You'd finish speaking, say, if anyone needs any help, I'll be at the back of the room.

Jim Banks [00:39:25]:
There'd be, like, a queue of people that wouldn't want to come and work with you. Because I've always maintained that however much the tickets cost, you probably double that in terms of the travel cost for the individual. They may have brought team members with them and everything else. So it's a fairly significant investment of their time and money to come along. And I don't want to stand there and just give them really basic crap that they could watch five YouTube videos and get the same information that I'm giving them. I want to give them the good stuff. Let's say they've spent five grand to come to the conference with the ticket cost, the hotel flight, the incidentals, beers in the bar, whatever it might be. I want them to get five grand's worth of value out of my presentation alone.

Jim Banks [00:40:06]:
And then everything else that they see at the event is just gravy. I think a lot of it is. There has definitely been a challenge with event organizers. I had clients that were event organizers, and it was to see things from the background, like, in terms of, do you provide food or do you not provide food? Do you have all panels, again, like, there's some industries, wherever the industries are heavily, heavily white, male dominated. So you'll have a panel with four white men on it. And a lot of women, quite rightly say that's not right, that's not representative of the industry. So again, a lot of conferences now are trying to go down the route of having equality between 50% men, 50% women.

Sarah Stemen [00:40:51]:
Yeah, yeah.

Jim Banks [00:40:52]:
Which again, I think is great.

Sarah Stemen [00:40:54]:
Yes.

Jim Banks [00:40:54]:
But for me, that the challenge has always been going back to the, you want to have subject matter experts on stage. So it's like, if I can have four women that are the subject matter experts. Right. If it's four men and they're the best that I can get, great. I'm not picking them because of their gender or the color of their skin. I'm picking them because they know what they're talking about. Because I don't want to have one person that's really good, three people, people there just to make up a quota, to make it good for the kind of the event organizer. And then people complain about content.

Jim Banks [00:41:26]:
Wasn't that great? Because three people are not. It just becomes a messy, messy situation at that point to try and balance everything out. And again, it's almost like a tread, treading on eggshells, trying to run an event. I can't imagine how anyone would want to run an event, but hats off to anyone that does.

Sarah Stemen [00:41:43]:
Right? Right. Yeah, no, I mean, I love it. I mean, I found. So I guess we hadn't been doing conferences since before 2020. And it was funny, I remember Brayton, it was Brighton that now they purchased the PPC hero brand. I remember sitting and just being just absolutely riveted by the content and thinking, I actually don't have adhd. I've just been watching these speakers actually online. So, like, do you know Perna, I think.

Jim Banks [00:42:15]:
Oh, yeah, I'd panorama, phenomenal speaker.

Sarah Stemen [00:42:18]:
I mean, she just, like, mesmerized me.

Jim Banks [00:42:20]:
Yeah.

Sarah Stemen [00:42:21]:
You know, and so it was like these people that have known online and just seen their stage presence, they take it up like, you know, like five notches. Yes.

Jim Banks [00:42:30]:
It's funny. I mean, I know Kelvin that runs Brighton SEO here. I mean, in the UK, I try and go to Brighton SEO in the UK.

Sarah Stemen [00:42:39]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:42:39]:
They have two events, one usually in the spring, one in the autumn.

Sarah Stemen [00:42:43]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:42:43]:
Or the fall, as you guys call it. And I try and go to one or the other. I tend not to do both of them. But it's, again, it's really interesting here in the UK because it's a much more well established, very, very popular conference. There is definitely a lot more first time speakers, new speakers like it. Again, like the. A lot of the tickets that kind of are put up there, they're put up in a sort of ballot, so people get free tickets for the conference. Some of the people that speak have sponsored booths, and they speak because their company paid for a sponsorship that included a speaker slot.

Jim Banks [00:43:17]:
Again, even if that's the case, you still want them to add value. You don't want them to come.

Sarah Stemen [00:43:21]:
Oh, yeah.

Jim Banks [00:43:22]:
You know, you don't want it to be a sales pitch. And I've had situations where people stand up on stage and do that. They pitch, and I'm like, whoa, this is. I made the mistake of sitting right in the middle of a road. I want to get up in the leave, but this is like, it would look really, really awkward if I did. So I was right in the middle and I just thought that wouldn't be right. But, yeah, I just think. But I think the Brighton SEO that was held in San Diego, I mean, I spoke to lots of friends who went, people again, who's been a guest on the podcast, and they said the speaker kind of quality was amazing and again, pulled out all the stops.

Jim Banks [00:43:57]:
He kind of, he threw the kind of, you know, I want a whole bunch of new people to one side because he wanted to make sure he made the right splash when he launched him in the US. And I definitely think that that's something he achieved, for sure.

Sarah Stemen [00:44:10]:
Yeah, no, it was phenomenal. And I would definitely say a mix of new speakers and old, but, like, the new speakers, like, we were new, but we've been around and we've been speaking. So, like, people that are new speaking, but I didn't know they were new. Like menachem. It was his first time speaking.

Jim Banks [00:44:28]:
Oh, really?

Sarah Stemen [00:44:29]:
It was? Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:44:30]:
Again, he's so knowledgeable about.

Sarah Stemen [00:44:32]:
So not. Wait, so it's like these people, it didn't matter if they were new. They deserved to be there. Just like people that were older. And then as far as the pitching, I would say, like Nava does, like when she plugs optimizer on the optimizer stage.

Jim Banks [00:44:49]:
Yeah.

Sarah Stemen [00:44:50]:
So let's be fair about it. I love how she does it because it's at an appropriate time, and then she laughs about it. It's like, well, I'm allowed to do it because I'm on the optimum stage. Never sounds like a pitch, and it truly is a fantastically genuine tool, and they provide a lot for the industry. So I do feel like there's, again.

Jim Banks [00:45:07]:
To go back to Crystal from Wix. I mean, you know.

Sarah Stemen [00:45:10]:
Yes, Crystal. Let's see.

Jim Banks [00:45:11]:
They hammer the living daylights out of wix, but it's, like, done in such a nice, nice way, right?

Sarah Stemen [00:45:16]:
Yes.

Jim Banks [00:45:17]:
Everything about it, I love Crystal. So it's, again, like. So although she's talking about Wix and Morty's talking about Wix when he's presenting, it's, you know, mine. I mean, again, you know, you want people to talk about the company that they're representing, if they're proud, represent the company, and the company's good, but don't make it a out and out sales pitch you can kind of ignite. You're absolutely right. Nava will do it in a much more subtle and diplomatic way.

Sarah Stemen [00:45:44]:
Exactly.

Jim Banks [00:45:46]:
I love optimizer. I love watching Fred present. So the fact that he and I are presenting at Popcon, I'm just blown away because I get. I get to sit there and enjoy listening to him as well as sit and listen to me. I mean, I'm sure he'll blow me away far more than I'll blow him away. I think I have a different viewpoint on the topic, and I think when you look at it, I mean, we brought three white guys together, Steve, Fred, and me, and people who go, well, you know, you shouldn't have that. But again, I think when you look at it, you know, we are three very well. Well, yeah.

Jim Banks [00:46:19]:
Traveled, versed, PPC, people that know our stuff, and I. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sarah Stemen [00:46:26]:
And I feel like, you know, to your point, and maybe. Maybe the bar is higher among white men at this point. And I say right back at you, because I had to take some time after having kids, so. Too bad, so sad. But I would also say, like, there is a space for what I'm gonna call, like, white men that do, like, everything in their power to lift up women. So, like, I would classify, like Boris, for sure. Someone in that category. Like, if he was on a white male panel, like, I would be really remiss if someone said something, because all he does is cheer for us.

Sarah Stemen [00:47:04]:
So I do think there's. It. Like, it's very, very clear when it's, like, a white man that doesn't support women versus a white man who just happened to be a white man but supports. Like, I mean, think about all the women guests you've had. You're a woman supporter.

Jim Banks [00:47:17]:
And the thing is, I mean, I have, you know, like, female members of my family who work in our industry. And certainly when we first started, I mean, there was so few women that did it. But it's a perfect, it's a perfect career for females. Tim Ash, when I had him on as a guest, he was talking about how women are far better than men at digital marketing because it doesn't require any physical kind of. You don't need to have big guns and everything else. It's just, you just need to be smart and intelligent and, you know.

Sarah Stemen [00:47:50]:
Yeah, yeah. And, like, emotional. There's like an emotional component to marketing that I was just reading an article I have to submit it to today for search engine land. It was on the AI component. And it's like there's a lacking. Our world is lacking emotion right now, and that's like, what women can oftentimes bring.

Jim Banks [00:48:08]:
Yeah, but to your point, I mean, like, so pre pandemic, I did a lot of speaking. I probably spent three months of the year traveling, right. Speaking at lots of conferences. And then when Covid happened, I obviously got involved in doing more sort of webinar type things. So I invested money in lighting and cameras, microphones, all that sort of stuff. But it got to the point where when things had got back to normal that the speaking was available, I did again, I just, I was conscious of the fact that I was too old, too white, and taped, too male. Right. But I think that kind of the component that's probably given me the confidence to go back and do it again, right.

Jim Banks [00:48:50]:
Is that I'm also probably very knowledgeable, which I think in some respects, like, probably, in certainly my view, it's like, it gives me a decent chance of having a place on the stage. Right. And to your point, I'm absolutely all for helping raise up the women in our industry. And I do a lot of, in the affiliate industry, there's an initiative called Link Unite, where it's all women. I've spoken loads about it, right. I've met the two ladies that founded it, Sara and Abanda, and they're fantastic. Really, really great business women. Love, love what they're doing there.

Jim Banks [00:49:29]:
Every woman I know in the industry, I've said, look, you should join this. It's fantastic. How would I know it's fantastic because I'm not a member of it, because I can't be a member of it. But at the same time, all the women I know that are in it are powerful business leaders, very successful. Right. So if you get in there, there's every likelihood that you'll pick up off the vibe of the women that you have. And they have, like, events, and they obviously do lots of sponsorships. They do like a mentee mentor situation where they'll pair up a well established person and a newcomer, I think is phenomenal.

Jim Banks [00:50:02]:
I mean, like, I've been to lots of conferences where we have like a, something called a speakers enclave where we will help first time speakers. We'll get everyone that's a brand new speaker, and we'll help walk them through how to present themselves and everything else. And again, I do that. I've done that with loads and loads of people who have ended up going on to become keynote speakers. They were doing it for the first time, and they were absolutely nervous as hell. But I'm like, look, you'll be phenomenal, you know your stuff. And I kind of did a little bit of training and help, right. To kind of make sure that they were going to be good.

Jim Banks [00:50:34]:
And they were absolutely fantastic. And I've also done it wherever. When I had event or event clients, I would go to other events and sit in the front row and watch people speak. And I would watch, particularly women. I'm looking for really smart women who are, have a good stage presence, a good kind of command of their topic. Some of them I managed to get on stage, keynote at conferences because I've actually watched them present. And I know that I'm not just putting it up because, you know, I think Narva called it eye candy. Right? It's like, again, I really couldn't care what they look like.

Jim Banks [00:51:09]:
It's like, do they know what they're talking about? Have they got a good commanding presence on the stage?

Sarah Stemen [00:51:14]:
Like, good God, I'm 45. I could have been eye candy when I was 20, when I, when I was building that YouTube channel. Right? Like, no, that's funny. That's funny.

Jim Banks [00:51:25]:
So, Sarah, where do you see our industry going? Like, in terms of, like, maybe the next five years, right. You say it's doomed and dead. Right? Do you think it's kind of.

Sarah Stemen [00:51:36]:
So. I do think it mimics the economy a lot. I think that's the reality of marketing. It's sort of always seen as like an extra. So just as if we look at the economy and what's happening is you have the people that can afford it and the people that cannot afford it, and that gap is getting wider and wider. And I think that that is going to continue to happen. So I think it's going to be tougher for freelancers that aren't able to adapt, which is why I've again chosen this consulting model. So for me, it is also making those relationships with larger agencies.

Sarah Stemen [00:52:16]:
So I didn't talk about that, is that if I bring on a client and I'm consulting with them and I feel like they need an agency, I have partnerships where I can refer them out to an agency, and sometimes it would be a straight referral. Other times it's sort of a soft referral where I'm referring them. But I'm engaging in that project at the very beginning and helping with that strategy. Now, you do have to have a very, very, very tight relationship with the larger agency to do that because no agency wants somebody else to dictate a strategy. So now I already have those types of relationships in place.

Jim Banks [00:52:49]:
So I think that's important. And again, going back to kind of pre pandemic, I used to do all this traveling, and a lot of it was to forge those relationships with agency owners and everything else because again, if you don't do something that yourself, like I said, we specialize on e commerce business, Shopify stores, but there'll be people that are running on bigcommerce or woocommerce or they've got their own custom built proprietary system or they're doing lead generation in finance or, you know, whatever. But again, I know lots of other agency owners that kind of do SEO, that do like organic TikTok and stuff like that. So. And for me, it's like I've never necessarily haven't worked with them, but I know the people behind them and I know that they have integrity in kind of the way they conduct themselves and everything else. So I would feel confident and comfortable to put them forward as a somebody says, hey, I need some help with this. I've got a big book of contacts that I can say, we'll talk to Sarah, because Sarah's really good at this, all that. So it's, I know what people are good at and I know what they don't do.

Jim Banks [00:54:00]:
And that way I can help make some introductions because again, ultimately, I just want to make sure there are way more clients needing help than there are good people to do the help. So I just want to make sure that the clients that need the help and get the help without getting the kind of poor experiences that you'll hear from so many other people where they go three agencies before and they're all horrible. And I'm just wit's end because ultimately, if a, if a client is, let's say they've got a CMO. The CMO could be under huge pressure for their job because they made three bad decisions hiring three agencies that failed.

Sarah Stemen [00:54:40]:
Right, exactly.

Jim Banks [00:54:42]:
So in some respects, you could be the agency that stand between this person losing their job or getting promoted. So I have a vested interest in making sure that I can make them look good in the eyes of their bosses. That's all. I do that a lot. I always say, like, my job is to make you look good to your boss. I can only do that if you help me by doing the things that I'm asking you to do. I'm not asking you just for fun shits and giggles. I really need you to do this stuff.

Sarah Stemen [00:55:10]:
Right, right. No, that absolutely makes sense. So, yeah, I think that's where it's going to go. I think, unfortunately for the single channel, I just do Google Glads and that's what gets the results. I think that's going away. I think it'll be more holistic marketers back to knowing everything and how to piece together, like, a full marketing strategy and then helping that client. That will be done either in house or on the agency side.

Jim Banks [00:55:38]:
I think we're to go back to five cent clicks, 25 character titles on TikTok.

Sarah Stemen [00:55:45]:
Maybe if it's, like, legal that way. I don't even know. I do sometimes find myself, I'm like a hope for a new social media thing. Like, just something new should come out.

Jim Banks [00:55:56]:
Yeah.

Sarah Stemen [00:55:57]:
Because I do feel like knowing what I know now. I'm like, if something new on social media comes out, just run to it. Just run to it. That's how you build until it goes down.

Jim Banks [00:56:06]:
Yeah, yeah. It's funny, I remember when, when Quora first came out. Like they had organic quora and then they came out with an ad product.

Sarah Stemen [00:56:14]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:56:14]:
And I had some success with it, but again, not so much that I really thought, because primarily it's b two b. Right. So it didn't really vibe with my e commerce kind of strategy, so, you know. But I think for people that are in certain verticals, in b two b makes sense.

Sarah Stemen [00:56:30]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:56:30]:
Quora would be great for that. Right. Both from organic and a paid perspective.

Sarah Stemen [00:56:36]:
Yep. That's hilarious.

Jim Banks [00:56:38]:
But, yeah, but I think the challenge is you can spread yourself way too thin. Right, again, yeah. And, yeah, like, you, you've obviously got your kids and they're the most important thing. Your life and your husband and, you know, your social life and fitness and everything else. It's like, you know, do any good, can't do good work for people if you're dead. Right.

Sarah Stemen [00:57:00]:
So, yeah, if you don't take care.

Jim Banks [00:57:02]:
Of yourself, look after your mental health. I always encourage, like, people when they get the opportunity to spend a bit of money and travel, to go to conferences. Even if you're not speaking at the conferences, it's an opportunity for you to meet your peer group, hang out.

Sarah Stemen [00:57:16]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:57:17]:
Go and have a drink in the bar, go for dinner. You'll. You'll get a really good feeling from kind of going along. Right.

Sarah Stemen [00:57:25]:
And build the relationships that I think really make the industry what it is. Right. Yeah, I think that's, that's the best thing. If I need an SEO, you'll know who to call. Right.

Jim Banks [00:57:34]:
So, yeah, and it's funny, I've done a little bit of SEO, but really it's not been my sort of my core competency, but I know so many people that do SEO. I know lots of people that work at Google, right in on the sort of web spam team and stuff like that. So people get booted out of Google. I can make calls, things fix pretty quickly, even though I'm a paid search guy. But again, I made the effort to go and meet these people at conferences and hang out with them and go out for dinner and everything else, not because I was trying to get something from them, I wanted information.

Sarah Stemen [00:58:08]:
Yeah, same.

Jim Banks [00:58:09]:
Hang out with them.

Sarah Stemen [00:58:10]:
Yeah. Just have fun.

Jim Banks [00:58:13]:
Sure. So, Sarah, thank you so much for being on as a guest. It's been phenomenal to have you on. I know that obviously, all of your information will be in the show notes, and I'll make those available kind of after we come off air. If there was one place that you said, if you want to connect with me, this is the best place to go. Where would that be?

Sarah Stemen [00:58:33]:
LinkedIn.

Jim Banks [00:58:34]:
LinkedIn. Okay, great. And obviously, like I said, your LinkedIn profile will be on the show notes. Yeah. I mean, I think for me, it's been phenomenal to have you on.

Sarah Stemen [00:58:43]:
It's been really fun.

Jim Banks [00:58:45]:
And hopefully at some point in time, we'll get the opportunity to meet in person and actually maybe share a stage or whatever, for sure. Certainly have a drink and kind of hang out and. Yeah, I mean, at some point in time, I'm hoping to kind of get along to a Brighton SEO or a hero conf or whatever the kind of combined thing is. Yeah. I mean, if you ever find yourself in the UK, come to Brighton, SEO here in the UK, no more way around Brighton. Pretty well. All the good pubs, all the good restaurants, all the good bars, and I've.

Sarah Stemen [00:59:16]:
Never been to Europe, so that would.

Jim Banks [00:59:17]:
Be really fun, and Brighton's a really, really cool place.

Sarah Stemen [00:59:21]:
I would need to take, like, five Xanax to get through, like, an overseas flight.

Jim Banks [00:59:25]:
You'd be fine. Honestly, you'd be fine.

Sarah Stemen [00:59:28]:
I.

Jim Banks [00:59:30]:
Right, brilliant. Thank you so much, and we'll see you on the next episode of Bad Decisions with Jim Blanks.